Homecomings are not undistilled pleasures, writer-director Brad
McGann discovered. Like the main character in his feature film
debut,

In My Father's Den, McGann trekked home to New Zealand after a
long absence.

"When you come back home, it's tainted with this subtle sense of
failure," he says.

McGann returned in 1999, when his family and the New Zealand
landscape were tugging at him. But after an 11-year-stint in
Australia, he worried if he had achieved enough to weather the
homecoming.

"I work in an industry which is really result driven," he says.
"Ninety-nine point nine per cent of your time as a filmmaker is
spent in this netherland of ideas and thinking and writing and
throwing things out, and people only look at the results.

"I couldn't see how you could make a living doing this, out of
being a feature filmmaker.

"I felt like it was beyond my grasp."

It obviously wasn't. McGann's film won the International
Federation of Film Critics prize at the 2004 Toronto International
Film Festival and the Youth Jury Prize at the San Sebastian Film
Festival in Spain.

Not that the fame has gone to the head of the director, who
cites Ken Loach and Terrence Malick as his favourite filmmakers. An
acknowledged lack of confidence is a theme in the 40-year-old's
biography, but there seems to be more honesty than deprecation or
false modesty in his admission.

"I had always been interested in films, but had by no means seen
the possibility of being a writer-director," he says. "It was a
little bit like saying I wanted to be an astronaut."

He started his career studying marketing at the University of
Otago. McGann explains away his degree, saying, "Sometimes you have
to do things to find out you hate them."

He was applying for art school, switched to film, and when he
got into the Swinburne Film and Television School in Melbourne, he
found himself floundering.

"I was one of eight chosen for the course," McGann says. "I was
24, one of the youngest.

"I dreaded going to school every day. I thought, 'This is the
day I'm going to leave.' I didn't realise it would be so
competitive, so nasty."

He felt so out of place that he finally sat down with his
lecturer and told him the school had made a mistake. His lecturer
replied that the school was confident he had the creative capacity
and would learn the technique from them.

Matthew MacFadyen.

"It was such a beautiful thing to say; it was what I needed to
hear," McGann says. "Without that, I would have left and abandoned
my idea of being a filmmaker at all."

McGann's debut film is based on the 1972 novel by New Zealand
author Maurice Gee.

It tells the story of photojournalist Paul Prior (British actor
Matthew MacFadyen) who returns home to New Zealand, world-weary,
after his father dies.

While cleaning up his father's house, Paul stumbles over the
16-year-old Celia (Emily Barclay), who has made a cubbyhole of his
dad's derelict den. In movie marketing terms, Celia will change his
life ... forever.

Sick of taking photos in war zones, Prior agrees to teach
journalism at the local high school, but then, just as the
friendship between Paul and Celia develops, she disappears. That's
where the story kicks into gear.

"I was interested in someone who had gone out into the world to
record other people's wars, but had run away from his own," McGann
says of the project, which was pitched to him as a one-hour
television drama by producer Trevor Haysom.

McGann initially felt the book was too dated and the market too
narrow for him to accept the project. Then he was inspired by a
dream starring two of the characters from Gee's book. He saw Paul
and Celia standing in a vast landscape, talking about the tide
going out and never coming back.

"The dream was contemporary and I recognised it as the central
landscapes of Otago," McGann says. "I needed to approach it and
tackle it in a different way."

McGann wrote the script, churning out 120 pages, which
translated to 126 minutes.

Shooting was initially difficult, but rewarding. McGann says he
found fronting his first feature confronting. He had 60 crew and
cast relying on him for direction and leadership, including
high-profile actors such as MacFadyen and Miranda Otto, who plays
Paul's anxious sister-in-law.

"When you come from writing it and you've got 60 talented people
to realise your vision, it's surreal," McGann says. "I'm a bit of a
socialist and I think the idea of being in a position of power,
where you can tell someone to do something and they would walk
across glass to make it happen ... [is] a weird feeling."

Instead, McGann took inspiration from the interviews of
pioneering American auteur John Cassavetes, who made Shadows and A
Woman Under the Influence. Taking courage from Cassavetes's
unorthodox working methods, McGann decided to work his own way.

"On the third day I went to the set and decided to get this
'machine' ... to suit me, my personality," he says. "I wanted to
work in a way that's quite Zen; to be a conduit for the talent
around me."

Nineteen-year-old star Barclay says McGann was supportive. As
Celia, the script called for her to appear nude, and walk across a
high bridge - and Barclay is particularly scared of heights.
Fortunately, Barclay says she trusted McGann.

"He thinks differently to most people," Barclay says. "He can be
quite wacky, but he's also very gentle and caring and thinks deeply
about things."

During the eight-week shoot last year, Barclay says the pair
swapped insecurities; McGann because he was directing his first
feature, and Barclay because she was 18 and inexperienced.

"We'd get together during shooting," Barclay says. "[He'd say,]
'Is this OK?' And I'd say, 'Am I OK?' We'd both say yes. We both
felt like new kids on the block."

McGann isn't such a new kid, but he has certainly broken
through. He calls In My Father's Den "flawed", saying he knew it
would be flawed because it was his first work.

"As long as people get the essence of the story and take
something away from that, then I'm happy," the filmmaker says. "You
can become fixated with the surface of making the film, the perfect
score, the turning points, but at the end of the day it has to be
about something."

Most of all, the director loves the feeling of completing a
major work after the career swaps and timidity of his 20s. It's a
kind of homecoming.

"There's an immense satisfaction. And you get to the point where
you can't turn back. There's very few things I can do otherwise. My
degree is obsolete. I could either go into incredibly low-paid work
like dishwashing or I had to be a filmmaker."